Square One

Because I have about fifty other things going on, including a few stalled blog posts and an increasingly urgent need to pack for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (my BFF is treating me to the Amtrak fare and a long weekend’s mutual writerly support, yay!), but I also feel like shaking up the uber-serious mood of this blog ever since that last piece posted, and finally, because I have been inspired by a dear friend’s adventures in (ahem!) ‘art’ criticism, I give you… this.

Please understand that I do not, in any way, endorse the practice of taxidermy. (FFS, I’m a vegetarian!) But I happened upon this… thing in a bookstore near VCU (which, in keeping with its catering to eccentricity, is open sometimes, closed at other times, with no predictable pattern to it), and I just didn’t quite know what to do with the surreal image. So of course I’m foisting it upon you.

…And, what was even more inscrutable? The other end (business end?) of said chipmunk¹:

(Note: If you couldn’t make that out, the lettering says, The rule of consciousness is near. Um, okay, WHAT?)

Which, to me, doesn’t make me a lick of sense, but maybe I’m just not enough of a ‘real artist’ to get it.

I suppose this would be called, by aficionados of the form, either ‘mixed media’ or ’sculpture.’ (And/or ‘animal cruelty,’ ‘crap,’ and ‘OMFG what drugs was this person on when they made this thing’ by others.)

Let’s say we agree to call this ’sculpture.’ (For the purposes of argument. C’mon, just play along.)

If, indeed, it is sculpture, how did it get there? Is this ’student work’? And if so, is it, by any bizarre chance, the work of a student in VCU’s Sculpture Department, ranked again by US News & World Report as the top program of its kind in the country?

(Clearly, stranger things have happened.)

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¹ Unless it’s actually a squirrel and I’ve got everything wrong. It’s not like I’m an expert in differentiating between varieties of taxidermied rodents, okay?

This morning I’m listening for a second time to a podcast I’d downloaded weeks ago, and hadn’t gotten around to playing the first time around until just yesterday. This is the broadcast for the habitually brilliant This American Life’s episode #354, “Mistakes Were Made,” which originally aired on April 18th of this year. You can hear the episode in full by selecting the above link. (Your options are to play it for free through streaming audio at the website, download as an mp3 for $.95, or purchase the episode on CD for, gulp, $13.00.)

There’s a prologue, just under eight minutes, that’s interesting enough, but if you’re pressed for time and you want to get to the utterly amazing story at the heart of this broadcast (Act One: You’re as Cold as Ice¹), you should feel free to skip ahead; you’ll want to be at about the seven minute, 50 second point. (It’s hard to do this in an exact way with streaming audio, so if you’re doing that, just sit tight.)

This is the story of a man named Bob Nelson, a perhaps unlikely historic figure in the science-fictionesque would-be “field” of cryonics. His story makes for quite the parable on “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head,” and one to which, curiously, I can relate, based on my own past failings (for example, my brief, hilarious-and-yet-truly-awful tenure as the acting President² of Richmond, Virginia’s chapter of NOW), and the failings I’ve witnessed in others, both strangers and loved ones (although, to be fair, the failings I reference here were, generally speaking, on a far less spectacular and shocking scale than are evident in Nelson’s tale).

But more than exploring the “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head” motifs, Nelson’s story exposes some very fascinating truths about the very nature of truth. In the trainwreck course of Nelson’s involvement in cyronics, this man became a master of the art of rationalization. Soon, his rationalizations had metastasized into a pattern of deceit so profound that, even now, in his attempts to reconcile everything that happened, he seems authentically unclear as to what actually happened. In short, he lied enough that he came to believe his own lies.

This is different, it seems to me, from the variety of deceit that is inherently malicious. In the interviews which comprise this broadcast, Nelson left himself utterly open to having his narrative challenged - and indeed, disproved. Had he been maliciously deceitful, he would have been far more artful in his deceit. He would not have, for example, granted such open interviews. (A wise attorney will not place a defendant she or he knows to be guilty on a witness stand for cross-examination; so too, a liar who means to cause harm with his untruths will be far more dodgy with his or her approaches to narrative.)

I have known a great many otherwise innocent people who have lied themselves into corners from which they could not, subsequently, extricate themselves in any meaningful way. For example: a severely traumatized rape, battering, trafficking, torture, and stalking survivor, who was so afraid of her past abusers that she was willing to file false police reports about continued stalking episodes, on the basis that doing so would give her documentation needed to obtain a current and enforceable protection order, should the need arise. But when I found her an FBI agent who was, without qualification or hesitation, willing to pursue a serious investigation of the criminal organization to which her most dangerous of all her previous abusers had belonged? (Her cooperation with which could have garnered her entrance into the federal Witness Protection program.) She completely shut down, was not at all willing to testify. Needless to say, there were unintended consequences she (and I) faced because of these decisions. (And soon, the window of opportunity, during which the agent in question had promised to be available to her, had shut; he was pulled out of state to investigate the Montana Militia.)

What is more? In the course of trying to advocate for this woman (who was my partner at the time; “Lee,” as discussed tangentially elsewhere), it became clear to me that, even when she changed her story - or her rationalizations for the various versions of her story - she genuinely believed what she was saying, each time she spoke. The traumas she had experienced, both in the past and while I had lived with her, were all too authentic; I became painfully well acquainted with the evidence from same (for example: letters, phone calls, having our apartment broken into, receiving hate literature from the same organization to which one of her abusers had belonged). But she coped with this (continuing) trauma through extremes of dissociation - which is, most plainly, one form of “lying.”

And in my own secondary traumatization³, I coped through my own acts of dissociation, accepting as literal truth whatever my partner said, no matter how frequently her story changed. Further, I did my damnedest to convince others of the veracity of each of Lee’s constantly morphing claims. Sometimes this meant exaggerating a situation, but more frequently, it actually meant minimizing it - because nothing, it turned out, made it more impossible to secure necessary, life-saving services (for example, police protection to go back into our broken-into apartment, so we could get ID and other essentials before leaving the state in the dead of the subsequent night) than conveying, to the fullest extent possible, how much danger she was actually in.

At the time, I had not heard of the phenomenon of folie à deux. One of the most painful aspects of my recovery from that traumatizing experience (in the course of which we led a substantively dangerous existence, the details of which are well beyond what I can address here) has been the effort to comb through everything that happened, and with both the benefits and hindrances of hindsight, separate the real from the unreal; what I’d feared - or hoped - was true versus what actually had been true. (What may be the truest fact of all from that time? That I may never be entirely certain of which things were unambiguously true, and which weren’t.)

Whereas folie à deux may be described as “a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another,” and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) describes how a person, traumatized in the past, emotionally re-experiences past trauma, and Secondary Traumatic Stress is a kind of “PTSD by proxy,” typically affecting persons in the helping professions, and Acute Traumatic Stress is construed to be PTSD’s precursor (in which the traumatized person is dealing with the events in the present, rather than exclusively past tense), what I was dealing with was the combined elements of all these disorders. As you might imagine, literal, objective truth in all matters (particularly those which were causing my partner and I such profound, visceral, and immediate distress) wasn’t easy to come by. (Although, paradoxically, my basic functioning required that I accept as “literal, objective truth” any number of things I subsequently understood could not have been true.)

Mistakes Were Made. The Women’s Studies scholar, anti-Klan activist and author Mab Segrest, with whom I corresponded in the mid-nineties, and who subsequently met with my partner and me, may have some understanding, looking back, of the “mistakes” to which I refer. (Even when, years later, I met with her again, and still could not articulate the dissonance between some of what I’d said to her in correspondence, and what I subsequently understood could not have been the complete truth.) As might Vednita Carter, who was my advocate when Lee and I were clients of the now-defunct organization WHISPER (she went on to form Breaking Free). As might Claudine O’Leary, whom I did not know at the time (although I’d read some of her underground zines on feminism, poverty, and related issues, published and distributed pseudonymously), but who has, since the late nineties, worked with many severely traumatized youth, from situations not unlike my partner’s in the immediate period before we met (she was nineteen then; I had just turned twenty-two). As might many of my friends and family members with whom I was sometimes in touch between 1993 and 1997. (I remain estranged from many of these loved ones, as a direct consequence of communications I had with them during periods of particularly acute crisis, which they, understandably, found traumatizing; perhaps we might call that “Tertiary Traumatic Stress”?)

The bottom line here is: traumatized people, who may still be in profoundly dangerous situations, develop creative, often dissociative, and thus often fundamentally dishonest ways of surviving on a day-to-day (sometimes on a minute-to-minute) basis, expressed alternately through extremes of passivity and hostility. However, this particular variety of “dishonesty,” in which so many untenable truths may be embedded, is one fundamentally is lacking in malice.

Hearing the broadcast about Bob Nelson a second time around, I remain appalled by the actions of this man, and their consequences for those who became embroiled in his (unintentionally?) twisted narrative. He has, to use the somewhat tired⁴ analogy, “Drunk the Kool-Aid.” (And to abuse the dubious analogy further, one could say his organs have accommodated themselves to his Kool-Aid’s poisons, such that he is now pathologically convinced of his own lies, and his consciousness could not survive attempts toward integration - which is to say, a substantive reckoning with real truth.)

It’s horrible, and it’s tragic, and it’s shameful.

But I doubt it’s all that unique. There are, I suspect, many more “Bob Nelsons” among us.

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¹ The subsequent and final segment, Act Two: You’re Willing to Sacrifice Our Love, concerning spoofed versions of the William Carlos Williams poem, This is Just to Say, is also brilliant.

² Emphasis on the “acting.” (As my friend Kimmy Certa can, I am afraid, attest.) (And yes, Kimmy, I really will write the whole story of that debacle… at some point.)

³ While there is a growing field of literature on what is called “Secondary Traumatic Stress” (see, for example, this book), it is geared almost entirely to persons in the helping professions, rather than, for example, family members and partners of the directly traumatized individual. In my own situation, my role bridged that of “partner” and “advocate” for reasons of necessity and, unfortunately, isolation. While we did, in fact, consult a range of social service, medical, and law enforcement entities in several states in an effort to get competent help for my partner, none of them were prepared to address the breadth of her situation. (For example, I consulted extensively at one point with The Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, but they finally determined they could not have her as a client, as - I am not kidding - she had been tortured on American rather than on foreign soil, which was beyond the scope of their mission.) In lieu of any of the competent, comprehensive services my partner so desperately needed, from social service organizations, medical services (due to injuries as well as malnutrition related to her past abuse), and law enforcement, we were on our own. And since she was still in some measure of danger from her past abusers, we were both in a constant state of terror, in ways that challenged our ability to so much as function - and left us with profound emotional scars. (I addressed these in my poem, “How the Fugitives - Two Women Lovers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” published in the November 2000 issue of Violence Against Women.)

⁴ The reference is also problematic for reasons RadGeek (Charles Johnson) has, quite compellingly, explored.

…in the lyrics to this song, and you have some sense of how my early-to-mid twenties went. (Lyrics are after the jump.) Also, please know that for the benefit of this post, I spent hours searching for some representative photographs of myself in the classic buzzcut of the era, which I would have happily scanned and reproduced here, but they are apparently buried in the detritus of more than fifteen years’ accumulated papers and pictures, scattered hither and yon. When I finally do track them down, I’ll gladly share.

Also, this post should not be construed as a condemnation of any among the varieties of feminism, nor is it a disavowal of my own experiences which are indirectly mirrored in the motif of this song. Rather, it’s just a glimpse back in time, and a gentle pondering of what (at 37) I can now credibly refer to as “my youth.”

(click on triangle to play song - hopefully it will work!)

[special thanks to Nat for the plugin recommendation.]

Did you enjoy that? Go here to buy the all-around brilliant album from the artist’s own site. Alternatively, you can buy just the song from Amazon or iTunes.

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(Continued)

frog on our back porch window, originally uploaded by vmarinelli.

…for no particular reason. (Click through to Flickr for notes.)

[taken 8/4/2004]

Earlier today I could not get enough of listening to Bikini Kill’s 1994 album, Pussy Whipped. Specifically, I had to hear Rebel Girl over and over (I even stopped to tweet this fact), as well as Alien She, which includes these lyrics:

…She wants me
To put the pretty, pretty lipstick on
She wants me to be like her…
I want to kill her
But I’m afraid it might kill me
Feminist
Dyke whore
Pretty, pretty
Alien
And all I really wanted to know
Who was me and who is she
I guess I’ll never know…

For reasons that will be evident to some of my longtime readers (though I can’t refer you to past explanatory blog posts, which is just as well because all that material has gone back into the proverbial cauldron for its eventual repurposing), these lyrics are searingly relevant to me. Due, I will simply say, to a woman named Lee whom I met late in 1992, shortly after I’d left Olympia for Seattle (with a New York art colony sojourn between), and following which the course of my life was violently and inexorably altered - as indicated, perhaps most clearly, by my official status, with law enforcement in Washington state, as a “missing person” in the summer and autumn of 1993 (although police in two additional states, plus the FBI, also wound up tangentially involved).

And even if those particular lyrics weren’t so immediately relevant to my history, there is also the touchstone fact that I had been in Olympia at the same time Bikini Kill was emerging. The riot grrrl scene was an alternate universe against which my own was being played out; many nights in late 1990 and early 1991 had found me standing guard for my sociopath girlfriend, Amy, who, without the slightest sense of irony, was spraying graffiti around town protesting violence against women¹. (Note: she was not only a serial batterer of her lesbian partners - see her hometown’s newspaper for crap she would still be doing more than a decade later - she also claimed to have a juvenile record for attempted murder.)

So, while I stood guard (the alternative to which was: trust me, you wouldn’t want to know), Amy would be spraying Dead Men Don’t Rape across the facade of the furniture store downtown. Then we’d go around a corner and she’d be hoping to attack another surface with her hilariously inappropriate sloganeering (which I came to regard as her preemptive strike against the credibility of the women she’d battered and raped; by attaining, under false pretenses, her “folk hero” status among the radical feminists and lesbians in town), out of nowhere there’d be some fresh new graffiti up, saying only Bikini Kill. And we had no idea what the fuck Bikini Kill meant (only later learned it was a new punk band, which would go on to define the riot grrrl genre), we only knew they were taking up precious wall space and really kind of pissing Amy off.

Despite the radical life-interruption that was Amy, though, it was, most substantively, the prelude to what would follow, in Seattle, with Lee.

Which is why, perhaps, this morning I struggled for what seemed an eternity to wake from a certain, apparently chaotic dream, the meaning of which I could not discern until I had physically written it out, on paper (as is often the case with me; it’s like, with the action of pen on paper, puzzles can be put together in very clear ways, even when, at first, I had not known there was anything besides chaotic and, most likely, meaningless fragments in play).

To read the full-sized journal entry, click here, otherwise you may be able to make out the words as they appear below².

Nope - the past still isn’t dead.

___
¹ The Olympian ran something or another in some crime or public complaint column about Amy’s exploits (not that anyone outside the lesbian community knew who was behind the graffiti); ironically, she’d had been an employee of the same newspaper when I met her in October of 1990. (Hey Olympian: check your HR records, if you have ‘em that far back. I can also tell you about the security guard she met there, with whom she committed robberies - or at least, so she was given to boasting while drunk.)

² Re-reading the bit about Pearl Jam’s song, Jeremy, coming on the radio as I was writing it, I think, inevitably, of where I once lived, on Jeremy Street, in a San Diego suburb, when I was thirteen. Then I go read the Wikipedia entry on that song, and I learn that one of the song’s inspirations was a disturbed junior high school student in San Diego. Um, wow.

Early this week, my husband’s aunt Barbara Seibert, a longtime advocate for survivors of domestic violence, passed away at the age of 53.

I cared about her deeply. She will be missed.

…I would probably still watch them. (For as long as we still have cable, anyhow…)

There was a point in my blogging life when I obsessively checked my Sitemeter stats.

Sometimes this resulted in hilarity. For example, in December of 2004, someone arrived at my site by Googling ryan home alabama thunderpussy +passed out . For those of you who are not of (or as is the case with me, “on the periphery of”) the RVA music scene, Alabama Thunderpussy (or ATP in polite circles) is a hardcore, punk- & metal-infused southern rock band, a recent video for which you can see at YouTube (and yes, I know plenty of the insane blokes in that video). In my blog entry (now unavailable, as it was from many torpedoed blogs ago) pertaining to that and a few other wacky searches that had been revealed by my recently installed Sitemeter, I commented:

I believe this harkens back to an entry concerning a party hosted by our favorite “fake rednecks” in ATP. A stray detail involved my taking a… nap on their lawn, which is distinct from “passing out” per se, thank you very much.

However, the fact that it occurred to anyone to conduct such a search makes me wonder just how many people have passed out on that lawn.

At other times, however, I got search terms that were creepy as hell. (Which I need not repeat here. Why put more crap into search engines than is absolutely necessary?) Or unnerving. Like the time someone, from an IP address corresponding to an organization with which one of my exes is affiliated, registered more than 20 page views - mainly in my “exes” category. (A category that no longer exists in this blog’s incarnation.) Or like the almost daily hits from Google on the name of a certain anti-prostitution activist with whom I’d previously tangled. (The first of two defendants listed under heading “Public Domain” at this link in the Minneapolis weekly, City Pages, if you must know.)

And sometimes Sitemeter was really useful to me - I’d learn, for example, that someone had linked to a post of mine, which would give me a quick way of replying back and engaging in sometimes very useful conversations across the blogosphere. (Just because I’m no longer engaging in those - or engaging them in only provisional ways - does not mean those discussions weren’t useful to me; I grew a great deal as a result, and made a number of friends, and thus remain grateful for the experience.)

But there came a point when I was spending more time wondering about my Sitemeter stats than I was doing much in the way of truly original writing (whether on the blog, or elsewhere). Subconsciously, and at first in very subtle ways, I began to censor and/or tailor what I was willing to post based on my statistics. There was a childish amount of glee I’d experience when some post or another would double or triple my site traffic.

Looking back, now, on some of those posts (for instance, one on an especially annoying RSS-feed swiping profiteer who, as it happened, had also once been a speechwriter for George W. Bush), and my own silly reaction to those occasional spikes in traffic, I’m embarrassed. Not because the writing itself wasn’t good (it was, generally, at least alright), and not because I wasn’t making valid points (I was, though I was increasingly prone to employing alternately pissy and dogmatic tones in the process), but because that was never the sort of writing I’d ever set out to do. I didn’t love it. So why was I doing it?

I longed for my earliest days of blogging. Since my archives from same are scattered all over the place, I’ll have to go from memory here, but in its first incarnation, the blog was called My So-Called Writer’s Life. Later it was Perpetual Exile (with a side blog, Minutiae: The Other Blog). Then, Southern Discomfort. Then Vortex(t). Then (as if I was trying harder than ever to alienate people) it was another made-up word: Anachroclysmic. (I have a feeling I’m skipping a few incarnations. Which is some indication of how split, scattered, and threaded through with ambivalence this endeavor has been.)

With each blog incarnation, I’d moved further away from my original intent, which was merely to contemplate aspects of the writing process, along the path toward completing what I was then, without any sense of irony, referring to as “my books” (With the occasional minutiae and random life details thrown in for good measure). This was, of course, back when I was actually sending out - and publishing - work, in bona fide, both dead tree- and web-based publications.

The first thing to adulterate my (inordinately delicate and unstable) blogging process was the introduction of comments. This got me embroiled in my very first blogwar, all because some buffoon, also, coincidentally, with a blog called “Minutiae,” got riled up because I had used that same word in my blog’s title. (The hundreds of other blogs already out there, using the same word - as I soon discovered - were immaterial; because one of his own regular readers had accidentally found my blog while looking for his - and subsequently expressed great enthusiasm for my writing - this guy decided to launch an all-out war. It was beyond absurd.) Of course Minutiae was only part of the title, and it was for my intentionally peripheral “side blog,” but none of that would stop this fellow from leaving me a shit-ton of stupid comments. (Creatively, he signed some of them with my full legal name, setting up a whole “Victoria Marinelli” profile for these purposes, which Blogger subsequently refused to delete.) If I recall correctly, Blogger.com then lacked a capacity for moderating comments; all one could do at first was delete undesired comments, following which a notice would appear in the offending comment’s place, “…Deleted by an administrator” or some other such thing, which to me was nearly as aggravating as the original troll-droppings. Installing Haloscan’s (also far from perfect) commenting system was helpful to a degree, but by then my focus had already shifted, and was less about the writing of books (or even blogs) and more about the strange new community of bloggers I’d found¹.

The second thing to shift my blogging paradigm, of course, was Sitemeter. Immediately, there was an addictive element to the newfound ability to have some sense of who was reading me, what pages they were most interested in, what outgoing links they selected, and so forth. Superficially, Sitemeter made the blogging process less lonely. Now that I had some investment in comments, I had a newfound insecurity whenever a given post didn’t receive comments. But if the statistics showed that I was, at least, being read, that was some comfort, and I felt encouraged enough to go on.

Over time, these ostensibly useful tools had become crutches for me, and as described above, actually changed the tone of my online work and, indeed, the direction of my life. I’d ceded a lot of power to a few functions of javascript. Where were the days of sitting around one fall evening in someone’s backyard in Oregon Hill, learning for the first time that I was being read, only because a friend of my husband’s (who has since become a close friend of mine) said he’d been waiting, patiently, for my next blog update? That small moment of validation had energized me, serving as fuel for several more weeks of the otherwise inherently lonely endeavor.

And now, for me, that’s just it. I’ve realized I’m never going to get my books written unless I’m willing to go back to that place of mostly unadulterated solitude, the intentional embracing of what is often a very terrifying loneliness. While there are, no doubt, others who know how to maintain their own centers of gravity even while engaging in (often very volatile) online communities, time has proven to me that I am not one of them. And while I’m not eschewing comments (I actually really like the Disqus commenting system I’ve recently implemented for various reasons, not least of which because it enables commenters to have more control over their own narratives, across the numerous blogs that are now using it), I am moderating them (though almost everything that ends up in my mod queue does eventually make it through to the site), while I’m also working hard to stay true to my own voice, and not censor expressions I think may be met with disfavor (as I certainly expected would occur yesterday) or bafflement.

Sitemeter, however, just had to go.

So if you’re linking to me (either to an individual post or to my blog as a whole), please don’t assume I know it (much less hold me responsible for engaging in conversations about such links and/or linking back). Those of you - particularly from higher traffic blogs - who may have linked to me in the past may be understandably confused, or perhaps even offended, but I hope you won’t be, because there is no “diss” here - rather, there is just a very determined effort to refocus, to find my way back.

And while I will no longer have a formal blogroll as such, there is an acknowledgments page in the works which will link to almost everyone I can think of over the years who has linked to or otherwise supported me, which will take some time to put together, considering the wildly disparate, gorgeously cacophonous bunch of people you are².

For this same page, I will also be listing some otherwise unsung heroes of my life, who have never had blogs. From Olympia, WA (and now Asheville, NC), for instance, there is my old college roommate and one-time road trip companion Ellane Chandler. (I may never finish writing our take on the Kerouacian experience; perhaps she should take over, since she is as fine a writer as I have ever known.) And before that, from Kauai (but now Greensboro, NC), one of my dearest and most loyal friends on this earth - also a talented writer, with genius, insane wit - Beau-Jacques Handy. And before that, from San Diego (but now Woodbury, MN), I would have to acknowledge the very generous soul in Jen Lewis - who, bizarrely, was in the Twin Cities during the same years I was floundering there, though we could not have known it at the time; in retrospect, I take a certain comfort in knowing we were sharing certain regional experiences all along, like the “Bulletin Board” feature of the St. Paul Pioneer Press³.

Because I am, and will always remain, grateful for the support so many of you have shown me. I appreciate you all.

__
¹ Or that, in the beginning, found me. I’m looking at you, AJ.

² I could go on linking like that for days. If I didn’t get to you - and there are so many of you to whom I am grateful, I probably didn’t - indulge me once more with your patience if you can - the page really is in the works.

³ “Bulletin Board” now has something of an online equivalent, but to me, it’s just not the same. You had to see it in print in the actual paper, don’t ask me why.

When I mentioned recently that I was quitting the feminist blogosphere, I might have clarified I didn’t mean I’d ceased to be a feminist (um, hardly). I have, however, ceased to participate in the constant internecine warfare between factions of various kinds. Persons from Gleamingly Righteous Faction X, for example, might construe my efforts to engage in nuanced explorations of issues common to nearly all our factions, with strict, uncritical allegiance to the principles of Dastardly Hateful Faction Y. (Meanwhile, Faction Y would be vigorously asserting its own claims to gleaming righteousness, proving in comment threads across hundreds of blogs, with hundreds more fiercely engaged participants, that it was Faction X, in fact, which had been truly “dastardly and hateful.”)

I came to find this modality draining and unproductive, so I quit.

This is not to say that there isn’t any value, to feminist discourse, in these “blogwars”; rather, it is to say that I no longer have anything useful to contribute to them, nor to take from them; I am, quite simply and irrevocably, done with them, in acknowledgment of which I recently deleted four years’ worth of my blog, and started over. (Because it had all come to seem inexorably tainted by those wars, and my own embarrassing habit of resorting to polemic narrative over all other forms, even when - or especially when - other forms were most critically needed.)

That said, I understand there has been a brouhaha lately involving the feminist publisher Seal Press (one of several involving highly charged, and absolutely substantive, issues of white privilege). Beyond the link in that last sentence, I won’t go into the details - I trust the curious reader, not already eyeball-deep in the details from same, knows how to Google “Seal Press controversy” and such.

I will, however, share what I just posted to the publisher’s page on Facebook. Note that I was (mercifully) limited to 1,000 characters in leaving my comment for them, making it easier for me to resist various polemic temptations:

I’ve been loving Seal Press since the late 80s. My most prized Seal Press volume? Maybe the wonderful short story collection by Barbara Wilson, “Walking on the Moon.” Or perhaps Gerd Brantenberg’s “Egalia’s Daughters.” (I’ve since purchased a more recent edition of same for my now-teenaged daughter. Along with, most recently, Amanda Marcotte’s book. Both volumes she devoured whole. That’s my girl!)

But really? Part of why I will always support Seal Press is because of a volume you published when, I am certain, no one else was brave enough to: Kerry Lobel and the NCADV’s “Naming the Violence: Speaking Out About Lesbian Battering.” (That book saved my life once.)

And now I see you have quite a range of new material, and that you are doing your damnedest to survive as a feminist publisher. I understand you’ve had some travails of late, and I hope they’ve been a learning and growing experience for you. I’ll be cheering you all the way.

Long live Seal Press.

…And when I say that one of their books saved my life once? That’s not hyperbole.

I mean it actually saved my life.

__

Edited to add: I expound more on the (again, entirely warranted) criticism leveled at Seal further here, in comments at Hugo Schwyzer’s post titled “Seal Press Saved My Life.” (And since I’m in a clarifying mood, the “Seal Press Saved My Life” title - referencing my post here - rings more of a histrionic note than I might have wished to convey - no offense, Hugo - I said one individual book of theirs, published in the mid-eighties, saved my life, which, while it is still a sort of high-drama thing to say, is a bit different.)

Between my husband getting laid off last week (with all of three weeks’ severance - Jesus God what are we going to do?), his aunt dying yesterday, and an increased severity of political disillusionment on my part, I’m not much inclined to blog right now.

Fortunately, my favorite living author, Augusten Burroughs, has a new book out: A Wolf at the Table. I’m debating between devouring it whole (as I was starting to do this morning; see below) and savoring it for as long as possible. Or perhaps both. (Devour, then start over. Lather, rinse, repeat.)

In any event, I now have a place in which to engage my consciousness that doesn’t make me want to scream bloody murder. Or it does, but in a productive, Jesus-what’s-wrong-with-me-I-need-to-be-writing-like-this way. Augusten Burroughs is nothing if not an existential shot of courage, an escape hatch that isn’t such a benign “escape” after all (considering some of my own history that requires a fair amount of confronting; Augusten’s most recent book, notably, concerns his father).

Meantime, you can (almost) always find me on Twitter.